“As I come to the end of this column the sirens of Odesa announce that one more a Russian airstrike is approaching. For a while, I am out of the welfare machine, into the true human condition. What a gift.”
Odesa
It is in the nature of the column that it can – without exaggeration – be personal. Column writing, an English colleague told me many years ago, is like attending the January sale. You get an elbow in the kidney. Or there is a scream because you have stepped on a sore foot.
This column for once is about the columnist in his time, not about time as such. It is written in Odesa, not because there is a war in Ukraine, initiated by a fascist regime in Moscow with the aim of forcing the Ukrainians back into its empire and wiping out the freedoms of Europe, but because I am spending my 80th birthday here in the company of good Ukrainian friends. The invited Danes did not turn up. Do they prefer to die of boredom? Maybe.
In Odesa, I try to take stock of my life, a Danish life, a European life, a good life. Once again – earlier it was Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans – I try to face reality, specifically the task of the next weeks weeks: writing from and about Europe’s latest war. Then the reader is warned.
I am a child of the Second World War and grew up in the welfare state that made its debut in the 1950s under great social democratic leaders such as Hans Hedtoft, H.C. Hansen, Viggo Kampmann, and Jens Otto Krag (check them on Google). Without these men, I would hardly spend this June day on the Black Sea coast. Their state gave me health, education, and self-respect. I grew up in a family that was socially in decline, but possessed of ancient culture. My grandfather on my father´s side and my grandmother on my mother´s side was born on rich manor houses. A small castle outside Copenhagen was included in the portfolio. I grew up in Vangede, then the poor house of a municipality near the capital.
The Denmark of those days was a modest, but purposeful human-orientated state, wanting to become a decent country after the ravages of the Second World War. As a 15-year-old and not exactly promising schoolboy, I delivered milk and newspapers in the morning and had an evening job as a bellhop at the local cinema, seeing all the films for free. Half of my income I gave to my mother, who looked after other people’s children. In the summer of 1960, I joined a faraway provincial newspaper. Monthly salary: DKK 330 or 1800 hryvnia. 20 years later I found my journalistic home at Jyllands-Posten, Denmark´s leading liberal daily. The gate was wide, the ceiling was high, and tons of money was spent on what a succession of legendary chief editors considered good journalism.
I remember a Denmark in balance. Responsibilities and duties came before rights. Everyone was materially worse off than today. The average life expectancy then was 70 years versus 80 years in 2023. Are people happier now? Hard to say, but let me venture a claim: in those days you saw progress. What do we see now? Prosperity-problems, anxiety and bewilderment, bureaucracy, and alienation. A disorderly mentality of demand has replaced the orderly and purposeful behavior of my childhood and younger days. Maybe back then we were more, because we all had less.
As I come to the end of this column the sirens of Odesa announce that one more Russian airstrike is approaching. For a while, I am out of the welfare machine, into the true human condition. What a gift.
PS: The morning after. I believe that in my sleep or near sleep that I heard two or three explosions out in the darkness. Three people were killed, I am told, and many injured. A bad night, Russian terrorism, Ukrainian reality. A day of the morning has been declared.
Author: Per Nyholm
Danish journalist since 1960, based in Austria, columnist and foreign correspondent at the liberal Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten. This text was written for The Ukrainian Review.
